David Blight - January 25, 2007
Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Yale University
"Slaves No More: Two Recently Discovered Slave Narratives and the Story of Emancipation."
8:00 PM Friday, January 25, 2008
University Center Ballroom
Professor Blight’s seminal "Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory" (2001) won eight awards, including the Bancroft Prize. This leading authority on the Civil War and its legacy will lecture on the realities of black emancipation in the United States, in the light of the research compiled in his latest book, A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation (2007).
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"The Civil War and Emancipation in American Memory"
3:10 PM Friday, January 25, 2008
Gallagher Business Building 123
You are cordially invited to attend a seminar with David Blight, one of the foremost authorities on the Civil War and its legacy. After earning his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1985, he taught at Harvard and Amherst before coming to Yale. His books include Frederick Douglas’s Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (1989), Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001), Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War (2002), and A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation (2007).
For Race and Reunion, Professor Blight received the Frederick Douglas Prize, the Lincoln Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and four awards from the Organization of American Historians, including the Merle Curti prizes for both intellectual and social history. A Slave No More presents an incisive history of emancipation and combines the two newly discovered slave narratives of John Washington and Wallace Turnage. In June 2004, the New York Times ran a front-page story about the discovery and significance of these two primary source accounts. Professor Blight provides a historical context for the narratives as well as detailed biographies of the two authors.
His five edited and co-edited books include When This Cruel War Is Over: The Civil War Letters of Charles Harvey Brewster(1992) and Union and Emancipation: Essays on Politics and Race in the Civil War Era (1997). He also is one of the authors of the best-selling U.S. history textbook, A People and a Nation (2004). His articles on abolitionism, American historical memory, and African-American intellectual and cultural history have appeared in the leading scholarly journals. He is a frequent book reviewer for the Washington Post Book World, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe and many other newspapers.